A musical performance is strikingly akin to an act of commemoration. It is the job of musicians to commune with composers who, more often than not, are long dead.
The musical score occupies that mysterious, liminal space where a composer’s original vision meets the performers’ attempts to understand and interpret that vision. Only in performance is the vision – or a single, unique, momentary version of it – brought into existence.
And when it comes to breathing life into the strange hieroglyphics of musical notation, the all-important role must necessarily be given to intuition. Going further, we might say that, the older the music, the more important intuition becomes. Take, for example, Gregorian chant.
